Its trailer is only so-so — scream-stab shenanigans under a creepy narration from a little girl that lays out the movie’s back story — but the low-budget horror flick Hatchet, releasing September 7, has a pretty solid web site and an ingenious, parallel interactive recruitment site (“Join the Hatchet army!”), all of which could help it siphon off some business from horror aficionados who may or may not be disappointed by Rob Zombie’s reboot of the Halloween franchise. The film stars Joel David Moore (Dodgeball), Tamara Feldman, Deon Richmond, Joleigh Fioreavanti, Joshua Leonard and Kane Hodder, the latter of whom “stakes his reputation” on the fact that this is the best movie he’s been involved with. So… you know, there you have it — the reputation of Kane Hodder is on the table, suckers. Raise or fold?

The trailer for Lars and the Real Girl, starring Ryan Gosling, is up, and it looks to be a quirky little affair. Penned by Six Feet Under scribe Nancy Oliver and directed by Craig Gillespie (the mysteriously shelved Mr. Woodcock), the movie is described as a
heartfelt comedy, centering around Lars
Lindstrom, a loveable introvert whose emotional baggage has kept him
from fully embracing life. After years of almost complete solitude, he
invites Bianca, a friend he met on the Internet, to visit him. Lars even introduces Bianca to his brother Gus (Paul Schneider) and his wife
Karen (Emily Mortimer). The catch? Bianca is a life-size doll, not a real
person.

Gosling, of course, plays it straight and sincere in the trailer, and so a lot of the comedy lies in the reactions of those around him, chiefly Schneider, whose All the Real Girls, in all its small town quietude, seems somewhat of an influence here. The comedic elements will help this play a bit more broadly, but these dinged, nervous-guy protagonist movies — like James Mangold’s Heavy, Wayne Kramer’s The Cooler, and the forthcoming Dedication, off the top of my head, though I know I’m forgetting a couple better examples — are uphill slogs commercially without a mitigating plot point.

Now would seem to be the time where I say something like the clock is ticking on Gosling, and that he has to embrace more overtly commercial fare (what about one of these half dozen goddamned brooding comic book hero parts?) if he wants to capitalize on chance and jump aboard the stardom train. The thing is, that’s what the rather excellent Fracture was, after all — a piece of commercial work — and where did it get him? Even costarring Anthony Hopkins, the movie didn’t crack $40 million, domestically. Ergo, I’m totally on board with Gosling’s plan of avoidance. As he told me in an interview earlier this year, “My representation has pretty much given up on ever making much money on me.”

For Gosling, his choices matter heartily. He’s prepping his own directorial debut and he’s got Peter Jackson’s King Kong follow-up, an adaptation of Alice Sebold’s spare, haunting The Lovely Bones, coming up next year. Just like Johnny Depp, stardom will find Gosling when it’s damn well ready; he’s that talented. Thanks to the conviction of his performances, word-of-mouth on the guy
is sincere and lasting, so mainstream audiences will eventually come
around. And in the interim, I certainly don’t mind the adventurousness of his choices. Lars and the Real Girl releases October 12.

The trailer for Lions for Lambs, set for release November 9 through MGM, is up and running, and thankfully gone is the awful music from its first pass, in teaser form. It doesn’t look like quite Frank “T.J.” Mackey territory for Tom Cruise, but he is playing another silver-tongued aggressor, this time a hot-shit U.S. Senator. (Anyone else think Cruise could topline the David Vitter story if he so chose?) It’s no great fleshing out of the narrative, particularly. In fact, with Robert Redford barking, “Rome is burning, son,” and the trailer’s hammering home of terrorism being “the quintessential question of our time,” Lions for Lambs is certainly going to no significant lengths to sell itself to the hoi polloi; right now it’s The Charlie Rose Show and Meet the Press crowd or bust. Watch for at least a bit of a narrative expansion of sorts in probably about a month or six weeks.

The trailer for James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma has dropped, and it looks pretty sweet, all things considered. Mangold has always been a guy who values and gets great performances out of his actors, long before the success of Walk the Line. (If you doubt, rent the underrated Heavy for a look back at of the 1990s’ more interesting and unhurriedly paced independent flicks.) With Yuma — a remake of the 1957 Western starring Glenn Ford, and the story of a lowly cowhand rancher (Christian Bale) who gets caught up delivering a rakish desperado (Russell Crowe) for an appointment justice — Mangold has obviously inverted the demeanors and looks of his two protagonists, making Crowe’s Ben Wade comfortable in his own skin and Bale’s Dan Evans a reticent, small-fry guy who awakens to the idea of the sordid experience being of value as a lesson for his son (Logan Lerman). Notoriously averse to bullshit, Crowe is an actor who feeds off of matched-effort collaboration, and the extremely dedicated Bale seems like a great match.

And by the way, who would’ve figured, after 1999’s Liberty Heights, that Ben Foster would morph into a go-to guy for supporting roles as greasy, sleazy, hotheaded psychos (see Hostage, Alpha Dog, this and I believe 11:14 as well, if I recall correctly)? Strange, very strange. 3:10 to Yuma releases October 5 from Lionsgate; for the trailer, click here.

So the trailer for Captivity, the Roland Joffé film that created an uproar with its controversial marketing scheme and subsequent slapdown by the MPAA, has dropped online and in select theaters, and it does little to dissuade those that have argued passionately that Eli Roth‘s recent Hostel: Part II is indicative of the cultural highway to hell that this country is on. It’s “torture porn,” with flesh in a blender, goosing screams with little (apparent) sense of identification, yadda yadda yadda…

Look, the way these movies are marketed and the stark reality of them are two different things entirely. To me, The Hills Have Eyes and, most of all, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning are much more emblematic of the new stalking cinema of sadism, because they have so much more less to say than Roth’s Hostel flicks. The jury is still out and the book is still open on Captivity, meanwhile. Joffé (The Killing Fields) is a talented director, but he can succumb to laziness, and on the surface this has the scent of a paycheck job, like Boaz Yakin doing Uptown Girls or Wayne Wang doing Last Holiday. Elisha Cuthbert, who I really liked in the underrated The Girl Next Door — and not merely because she was playing a porn star, you hornballs — shows me nothing really special here, but the trailer is selling gore, not nuance. (Meanwhile, I guess armpit fetishists can dig on the above photo.) Uh oh… just noticed that Pruitt Taylor Vince (Heavy, Identity) is in the movie. That can only mean one thing, really. Well… one of two things, each related to one another.

UPDATE 7/18: For a full review of the movie, click here.

Well, the trailer for I Am Legend, starring Will Smith, has dropped. Releasing from Warner Bros. in December, the third filmed version of the well known Richard Matheson novella (and the first
to actually use its title) has, of course, gone through all sorts of casting changes and production starts and stops over the years, with actors like Arnold Schwarzenegger and directors like Ridley Scott and James Cameron attached to it at various points. Teaming with Smith — who has a penchant for milking the full commercial value out of apocalyptic scenarios — is director Francis Lawrence, who did some good things with the vaguely thematically similar Constantine, starring Keanu Reeves.

The first portion of the trailer is generic end-of-days mayhem, with surging, panicked crowds, explosions and the like. Yawn… It kind of looked like outtakes from War of the Worlds, honestly. The second half, though, hinted at something darker, or at least a bit more interesting. Naturally, Smith’s character is not alone, and some kick-ass action stuff will ensue. But the scope of the “desperate desolation” stuff — including an aerial city shot and Smith knocking golf balls off a skyscraper’s roof, somehow trumping Tom Cruise flailing about in an empty Times Square in Vanilla Sky — was impressive, and made me recall how much I loved reading Stephen King’s The Stand as a kid. Sure, this isn’t going to be Cast Away or anything, but it did make me think how sort of primal a response we have to abandoned human spaces, how that sets off deep-set warning bells that can only be described as innate and animalistic.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that this movie is going to slay at the box office. Smith pushed The Pursuit of Happyness to a $26 million opening and a $163 million gross last holiday season, and this wheelhouse pairing of bankable star and concept will make I Am Legend the year’s last big action epic, guaranteeing it a theatrical run well into Oscar race season. Again, for the trailer, click here.

The web site for this August’s new spin on the Halloween franchise has gone live, featuring a pretty substantive trailer warning that viewers must be “age-appropriate.” OK, thanks. Written and directed by Rob Zombie, the film is of course an origin story of sorts, with Malcolm McDowell inheriting the role of Dr. Loomis, made so famous earlier in the series by the late Donald Pleasance. I’ll be getting into this more later in the summer, but I’m not necessarily one of those franchise purists automatically set to hate this picture. Zombie, after all, did some pretty amazing things with The Devil’s Rejects, which was merrily depraved and of a singular vision, whatever one’s value judgment of it. In old-school fashion, though, I do miss the frittered-away, tattoo-fed, man-in-black plot strands of Halloween V. Call me crazy, I guess. I would’ve loved to have seen something pick up on those, though maybe they’ll be interwoven into this picture, if only slightly; Zombie was noncommittal on that matter when I last interviewed him. At any rate, the trailer works as a sort of sermon to the choir, I guess, but younger genre fans may need a more focused sales job. To access the Halloween site, click here. Be aware, though, that its base-level sound is cranked to bejesus-high levels.

In the wake of her arrest on suspicion of DUI, the trailer for Lindsay Lohan’s I Know Who Killed Me has bowed, and is available online here, to complement the low-fi, in-character video blog site that distributor Sony has set up. The trailer offers up a few story point clarifications (Lohan’s Aubrey Fleming is a student, while her post-abduction alter ego Dakota Moss is the stripper and doppelganger), but also raises more questions. I guess that’s the point, really, but they’re also not necessarily questions that seem to have any haunting hold beyond the trailer’s two-plus-minute running time.

Lohan’s dual characterizations seem of such bland, split-the-difference tonalities, and some of her line readings sound like drama class exercises. (Also, her ability to play around her age isn’t helped by the fact that her voice, shredded by cigarettes, already sounds like that of a 40-year-old.) Finally, I’m awaiting word from a source this weekend on a copy of the movie’s script or, failing that, confirmation on a plot detail that would, um… prove fairly interesting. Watch carefully for the glimpses of prosthetic limbs, that’s all I’m saying for right now.

The teaser trailer for producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Jon Turteltaub’s National Treasure follow-up, Book of Secrets, is online and in theaters, and though extremely short on action, it does a decent enough job dizzying up a plot of conspiracy centering around Abraham Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth, and 18 missing pages from his diary — pages which doubtlessly do not include a simple list of family muffin recipes.

Starring Nicolas Cage, the original National Treasure, from 2004, was a throwback treat — one of those rare PG-rated adventure flicks that still legitimately work for audiences above 14 years of age. It was also something of a surprise smash hit, nearly perfectly halving its $347 million box office haul between domestic and international receipts, despite the fact that its plot centered around desperately American items and contrivances, like stealing the Declaration of Independence. Future trailers will no doubt pump up the adventure in leaping fashion; full of shots of Cage pulling open shelves and peeking around, this one was for the parents. To that end, the cast, too (Harvey Keitel, Ed Harris and Oscar winner Helen Mirren, plus a returning Jon Voight), gives this project a sheen of respectability that helps mark it as terra firma for adult audiences.

Pushed back a month from the Thanksgiving perch of the original, Buena Vista will release Book of Secrets on December 21, and hope that the aftertaste of The Blair Witch Project follow-up Book of Shadows has abated. Again, to access the film’s teaser trailer, click here.

The trailer for The Golden Compass has bowed, and while it has some visual effects pop, I’m not sure that, to the uninformed masses, it could look any more like a reactionary knockoff of The Chronicles of Narnia without actually being accused of nipping footage from either that film or Epic Movie.

The film — the first adapted work from yet another series of fantasy adventure novels, these by Philip Pullman — centers on a 12-year-old orphan, Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards, no doubt rocking the three names in an attempt to differentiate herself from young Ms. Fanning), who tries to rescue a kidnapped friend and ends up on an epic quest spanning parallel worlds. Nicole Kidman (above), Sam Elliott, Eva Green and Daniel Craig costar, with Ian McShane providing some burly voice work. Chris Weitz directs, (the Weitz brother not responsible for American Dreamz, but the co-director on American Pie, Down to Earth and About a Boy), and if there’s precious little in his filmography to indicate he’s particularly well versed in this sort of level of effects work, all the right strings seem to have been pulled in securing the proper state-of-the-art support staff.

Still, this is pretty baldly New Line’s grand attempt to reclaim the holiday fantasy throne, wrestled away in 2005 by Walden Media and Narnia after The Lord of the Rings series became a genre mainstay for three seasons. I mean, we’ve got the inclement weather, young children, shape-shifting creatures, a talking polar bear, et al. With the next Narnia tale not due until 2008, there’s a bit of an opening here, purely in terms of scheduling, but will moviegoers beyond fans of the book series bite? After all, audiences have a way of punishing late-comers to the party that they deem too overtly similar to previous hits. (Take 1993’s Menace II Society, for an out-of-field example; though superior in many ways to 1991’s Boyz N The Hood, it grossed $27 million to $57 million for John Singleton’s debut film.) I have a glossy advance mailing packet around here somewhere, sent to me as a teaser last holiday season, so I’ll try to dig that up and post some thoughts on it in the next week or so. In the meantime, to access The Golden Compass‘ trailer, click here. And, of tangential interest, meanwhile, for a review of Kidman’s Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, click here.